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The WiiWare service may be debuting behind
Sony and Microsoft's services, but also it may well capture a distinct audience
that Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network cannot -- just as the Wii
itself does. One of the most notable things about it is how high-profile
developers like Square Enix, who've sat out the online battle thus far, are
delivering games to the service.

Final
Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is a spin-off
of a spin-off of what's likely the most popular role playing game series in the
world; it's also the dawn of a new way of working for a company used to
high-budget, CG-laden games.

The city-building simulator - a break from conventional Final Fantasy gameplay - is a launch game for the service, which
debuts in North America
this week and Europe
next week.

Here, lead programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi and
producer Toshihiro Tsuchida discuss the philosophy behind the biggest title in
the WiiWare stable so far, in an interview conducted shortly after their
presentation at this year's Game Developers Conference.

Jeremy
Parish: I was at the panel yesterday, and it was very interesting and very
candid, and I appreciate that. It was interesting to see the difference in
development this game took from the usual Square Enix approach.

Do
you feel that the growing size and complexity of games has stifled the
individual creativity of games? If you look at current Square Enix games today,
they tend to be more of a certain type, whereas in the PlayStation era, you had
things like shooters and fighting games that you don't see so often now. Do you
think that moving to WiiWare will help create smaller projects that can break
out of the current Square Enix mold?

Fumiaki Shiraishi: That's a lot of
questions at once. (laughs)

Toshihiro Tsuchida: To answer your first
question about stifling creativity, I don't think it's about stifling
creativity. It's just that you expect a division of labor when you work in such
a big group. You have creativity in your own little field, but you're limited
to that field.

But with WiiWare, as we said in the
session, people get to see the creative part of the game. Hopefully, we'll get
to train more people who see the larger picture, and hopefully, until then,
will go on to make different kinds of games.

JP:
So going back to the division of labor aspect of it, does the size of current
game development and requirements keep games from being a single person's
vision? It becomes more of a group vision, and focus-tested. Do you see WiiWare
as a remedy of that?

FS: That question assumes that without a
single vision, it's not as good.

JP:
Not necessarily, just that you create different games when you have a single
vision.

Brandon
Sheffield: I think the phrasing of it suggests that, but I don't think you mean
to suggest that.

JP:
Maybe you can rephrase it for me.

BS:
To rephrase, I would say... does the smaller team size of WiiWare allow for more
person-directed projects, rather than brand-led projects?

TT: There's two ways. One would be games
with a single focus, I think. We can make more of those. On the other hand,
even the larger teams... it's not necessarily that you can't have one focus. I
think we've managed to have some games with focus, but it does show up in
different ways, I think.

Square Enix's Final
Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

BS:
I'm curious to know how difficult it was, or if it was a welcome challenge, to
fit that game into a small file size. Was it challenging? I know when people
saw the screenshots of the game for the first time, they were like, "How
did that happen?"

FS: It actually wasn't that difficult. I
think we designed the game to fit in the memory space. It wasn't so much that
we had a game and had to squeeze it down. If anything, I think the size
restriction helped us. I don't think we would've had this game design idea if
we didn't have the memory restriction to begin with.

Once we had the restriction, we had... all
our artists are veterans, so if you tell them the size, they'll hit it right
on. And once we started making it, in the beginning, a lot of people didn't
think we could fit this game in the given size, but we were actually quite a
bit under. It uses a little bit of compression, and a little bit of techniques.
You can fit a lot of game in a small size.